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"I myself feel that our country, for whose Constitution I fought in a just war, might as well have been invaded by Martians and body snatchers."
- Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.
 |
| Vibration-Propelled Cruiser | ||
| A spacecraft with a propulsion system relying on waves in spacetime itself. |
| ...For the last three years, Sarto Sen, one of our most brilliant scientists, has been working on a great problem, the problem of using etheric vibrations as a propulsion force to speed matter through space. A ship floating in water can be propelled across the surface of the water by waves in it; then why should not matter likewise be propelled through space, through the ether, by means of artificially created vibrations in that ether, vibrations which can be produced with as high a frequency as the light-vibrations, and which thus propel the models through space at a speed equal to the speed of light itself. |
| Technovelgy from Crashing Suns,
by Edmond Hamilton. Published by Popular Fiction Publishing Co. in 1928 Additional resources -
|
The generators were cool -
Maybe a little like a Tesla coil.
Compare to these propulsion systems: Light Pressure Propulsion (1867),
apergy (1880),
Beam-Powered Propulsion (1931),
Granton motor (1933),
Vibration-Propelled Cruiser (1928),
geodynes (1936),
ion drive (1947),
Planetary Propulsion-Blasts (1934),
stardrive (1953),
solar sail (light sail) (1962),
Lyle drive (1961),
laser cannon (1966),
Bussard ramjet (1976),
asymptotic drive (1976),
Interstellar Laser Propulsion System (1985).
...an open door gave me a glimpse of the hip's narrow living quarters, while to the right extended a long room in which other blue-clad figures were standing ready beside the ship's shining, conelike vibration-generators.
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'Compounds devised by the biochemists for the rapid building of bone...'
'The car faltered as the external command came to brake...'
'It is about the size and shape of a kitchen stool, gyro-stabilized...'
'The greatest problem of all was the elimination of the human element of braking together with its inevitable time lag.'
'Across the ancient sea floor a dozen tall, blue-sailed Martian sand ships floated, like blue smoke.'
'Power could be compressed thus into an inch-square cube of what looked like blue-white ice'
